This invention relates generally to an oil-in-water emulsion, and more particularly, to an oil-in-water emulsion which functions as a tissue-specific delivery vehicle for lipophilic or amphipathic diagnostic, therapeutic, or other bioactive or inactive agents incorporated therein.
Imaging agents are used for diagnostic modalities, such as computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance (MR), ultrasound or nuclear medicine, to enhance the image contrast between tissue types. It is a shortcoming in the present state of the art that most of the currently used imaging agents are limited in action to the vascular and/or extracellular compartments. Thus, every tissue that receives a normal blood supply will also receive the diagnostic agent. Tissue-specific image enhancement is therefore compromised. Non-specific agents which reside in the extracellular space are useful primarily to discriminate anatomical features of tissues and structures. However, an imaging agent, which can deliver a diagnostic agent to the intracellular environment of a targeted tissue, could provide a means of assessing the metabolic and/or biochemical activity of the targeted tissue in addition to providing the standard anatomical visualization achieved with extracellular imaging agents.
In addition to the foregoing, agents which localize in the extracellular spaces are cleared very rapidly from the body. Due to imaging hardware limitations, a predetermined minimum period of time is required to collect the data that are used to form a diagnostic image. Consequently, a contrast agent that clears too quickly from the body must be administered in a very large dose in order to maintain a concentration gradient sufficient to achieve an acceptable quality of the image. Thus, the administration of many currently available diagnostic imaging agents is a complicated process balancing the benefits of image enhancement against the dangers of injecting large volumes of material into a living being in a short period of time. In the case of CT imaging, diagnostic imaging agents are commonly administered to the patient in volumes as large as 150 to 250 ml at rates of 1.5 to 2.5 ml/sec. Injection of currently available agents at this rate can induce nausea, headaches, convulsions and other undesirable and dangerous side effects. There is thus a need for a tissue-specific delivery vehicle that concentrates the imaging agent in a single targeted organ or tissue type and thus permits slower, controlled injection of a substantially smaller dose. Of course, a lower dose would also minimize the potential for toxicity and side effects, as well as preclude the need for expensive power injectors.
For therapeutic purposes, such as the delivery of radioactive therapeutic agents, it would be advantageous to target specific tissue and reduce the destructive effects of the radioactive agents on surrounding tissue. There has been much discussion of gene therapy for treatment of such diseases as familial hypercholesterolemia, hepatitis, or hepatomas. However, the delivery of corrective genetic material to abnormal tissues frequently fails because of an inability to target the genetic material to a specific tissue or to do so in sufficient quantities to replace the abnormal form of the gene. There is, therefore, a need in the art for a delivery vehicle which is capable of delivering genetic material to tissues at levels suitable for gene therapy.
Some known strategies for achieving tissue-specific delivery include the use of vehicles such as liposomes, antibody-linked conjugates and carbohydrate derivatives of the targeting compound. However, many of these known vehicles cannot form acceptable complexes with the moiety to be delivered or fail to accumulate the complexed moiety in the target tissue in bquantities sufficient to be effective for imaging and/or therapy.
One of the most accurate, non-invasive radiologic examination techniques available for detection of hepatic masses is CT using water soluble, urographic contrast agents. However, the contrast agents commonly used in this well-known technique suffer from the typical limitations which plague other known contrast agents, including, for example, the requirement that large doses be administered, a nonspecific biodistribution, and an extremely short (&lt;2 min.) residence time in the liver. As a result, CT has not been consistently successful at detecting lesions smaller than about 2 cm in diameter. These significant limitations of the known agents preclude early detection and therapy of cancer, since many metastases are smaller than the detection limits of the technique.
The inability of water-soluble urographic agents to detect lesions less than 2 cm in diameter with acceptable consistency may be due, in part, to the rapid diffusion of these agents out of the vasculature into interstitial spaces resulting in a rapid loss of contrast differential between normal liver tissue and tumors. There is, therefore, a need for a diagnostic contrast agent, or vehicle therefor, which delivers agent to the intracellular space of specific targeted tissue, such as liver tissue, so as to enhance the degree of selective visualization and further improve the detection limits of CT. A number of alternatives to water-soluble contrast agents have been investigated as potential liver CT contrast agents including, for example, radiopaque liposomes, iodinated starch particles, perfluoroctylbromide, iodipamide ethyl esters, and ethiodized oil emulsion (EOE-13). All of these agents are particulate in nature and of such a size for which liver specificity is mediated primarily via sequestration by the reticuloendothelial system (RES).
Liposomes, which are artificially prepared lipid vesicles formed by single or multiple lipid bilayers enclosing aqueous compartments are particulate in nature, and hence, have potential for delivering agents contained therein to the RES. Investigators have attempted to load liposomes with both ionic and non-ionic water-soluble, urographic or hepatobiliary contrast agents, or to incorporate brominated phosphatidylcholine into the bilayer membrane. However, stabilization of the resulting liposome against loss of contrast media from the bilayers has proven to be a major problem. Moreover, incorporation of neutral lipophilic agents into the bilayer is limited by the low solubility of the lipophilic agents in the membrane matrix and the restricted loading capacity of the liposome.
Several monobrominated perfluorocarbons have been evaluated as contrast agents in animals. The most common of these, perfluoroctylbromide, has been shown to concentrate in the reticuloendothelial cells of the liver, spleen and other organs. The long residency times (weeks to months) and the large doses (5-10 g/kg) necessary for suitable opacification will most likely preclude the use of monobrominated perfluorocarbons in humans for diagnostic imaging purposes unless a means of specifically delivering small doses to a targeted organ is developed.
The most promising of the investigational agents mentioned above, EOE-13, has been extensively studied in both animals and humans in the United States. EOE-13, an emulsion of iodinated poppy seed oil (37% iodine by weight) in saline, offered considerable improvement in the detection of space-occupying lesions in the liver and spleen as compared to conventional water-soluble urographic agents. Despite acceptable clinical diagnostic efficacy, a high incidence of adverse reactions, including fever, chills, thrombocytopenia, hypotension, and respiratory distress, was reported. Moreover, additional problems were encountered in the sterilization of the EOE-13 preparation. These problems led to the discontinuation of the use of EOE-13 in humans.
Recently, investigators have demonstrated a direct relationship between emulsion particle size and macrophage involvement. The investigators tested three iodinated lipid emulsions, including EOE-13, having mean particle diameters ranging from 400-2000 nm. They observed a marked swelling of Kupffer cells which, when coupled with sinusoidal endothelial damage, resulted in sinusoidal congestion. Sinusoidal congestion often activates macrophages, resulting in the release of toxic mediators which may be responsible, in part, for the adverse reactions seen with these relatively large-sized particulate preparations. As a result, the investigators emulsified iodinated ethyl esters of fatty acids derived from poppyseed oil (Lipiodol-UF, Laboratoire Guerbet, France) with egg yolk phospholipids, in order to provide a preparation of smaller, more uniform particle size, called Intraiodol (not commercially available; see, for example, Acta Radiologica, Vol. 30, pages 407-412 and 449-457, 1989). Intraiodol has a particle size range of 110 to 650 nm (distribution mean diameter 310 nm). Initial results obtained with Intraiodol in animals and humans demonstrated a significant reduction in adverse reactions relative to those observed with EOE-13. However, Intraiodol continues to suffer from many disadvantages common in the prior art, including failure to achieve true specificity due to, inter alia, liposome (particulate) contamination which results in delivery to the RES, size and composition, and inability to achieve shelf and heat stability. Moreover, the iodine necessary for CT opacification is attached in an aliphatic linkage, which is well known to exhibit diminished in vivo stability.
Although Intraiodol, and other similar oil-in-water emulsions, have been called "chylomicron remnant-like" and "hepatocyte specific," these agents locate significantly in the spleen, which does not contain hepatocytes. A true hepatocyte-specific contrast agent will not locate substantially in the spleen and other RES associated organs unless there is saturation of the initial receptor-mediated process so that there is a shift in delivery to the cells of the RES. Further, a true hepatocyte-specific agent will be cleared primarily through the biliary system. None of the aforementioned emulsions demonstrate hepatocyte-specificity with biliary clearance studies.
Accordingly, there remains a great need in the art for target-specific delivery vehicles or compositions, including contrast-producing oil-in-water emulsions, for delivery of diagnostic, therapeutic, and other biologically active or inactive agents.
It is, therefore, an object of this invention to provide an improved delivery vehicle, specifically a target-selective oil-in-water emulsion for delivery of lipophilic agents, or lipophilic derivatives of water soluble agents, such as contrast agents, to the intracellular spaces of the targeted tissue.
It is another object of this invention to provide a target-specific delivery vehicle, specifically a hepatocyte-selective oil-in-water emulsion, which is chylomicron remnant-like with respect to size and biodistribution characteristics.
It is also an object of this invention to provide a target-selective oil-in-water emulsion which is shelf stable and heat stable so that it can be heat sterilized.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a method of preparing a target-selective oil-in-water emulsion which is chylomicron remnant-like, shelf and heat stable, and substantially free of liposome contamination.